CHAPTER XXXI -- FLIGHT
Long after, when Count Victor Jean de Montaiglon was come into greatgood fortune, and sat snug by charcoal-fires in the chateau that bearshis name, and stands, an edifice even the Du Barry had the taste toenvy, upon the gusset of the roads which break apart a league to thesouth of the forest of Saint Germain-en-Laye, he would recount, withoddly inconsistent humours of mirth and tense dramatics, the manner ofhis escape from the cell in the fosse of the great MacCailen. And alwayshis acutest memory was of the whipping rigour of the evening air, histemporary sense of swooning helplessness upon the verge of the fantasticwood. "Figure you! Charles," would he say, "the thin-blooded wand offorty years ago in a brocaded waistcoat and a pair of dancing-shoesseeking his way through a labyrinth of demoniac trees, shivering halfwith cold and half with terror like a _forcat_ from the _bagne_ ofToulouse, only that he knew not particularly from what he fled norwhereto his unlucky footsteps should be turned. I have seen it oftensince--the same place--have we not, _mignonne?_--and I avow 'tis assweet and friendly a spot as any in our own neighbourhood; but then inthat pestilent night of black and grey I was like a child, tenantingevery tiny thicket with the were-wolf and the sheeted spectre. There isa stupid feeling comes to people sometimes in the like circumstances,that they are dead, that they have turned the key in the lock of life,as we say, and gone in some abstraction into the territory of shades.'Twas so I felt, messieurs, and if in truth the ultimate place ofspirits is so mortal chilly, I shall ask Pere Antoine to let me have agreatcoat as well as the viaticum ere setting out upon the journey."
It had been an insufferably cruel day, indeed, for Count Victor in hiscell had he not one solace, so purely self-wrought, so utterly fanciful,that it may seem laughable. It was that the face of Olivia came beforehim at his most doleful moments--sometimes unsought by his imagination,though always welcome; with its general aspect of vague sweet sadnessplayed upon by fleeting smiles, her lips desirable to that degree hecould die upon them in one wild ecstasy, her eyes for depth and puritythe very mountain wells. She lived, breathed, moved, smiled, sighedin this same austere atmosphere under the same grey sky that hung lowoutside his cell; the same snowfall that he could catch a glimpse ofthrough the tiny space above his door was seen by her that moment inDoom; she must be taking the flavour of the sea as he could sometimes doin blessed moments even in this musty _oubliette_.
The day passed, a short day with the dusk coming on as suddenly as ifsome one had drawn a curtain hurriedly over the tiny aperture above thedoor. And all the world outside seemed wrapped in silence. Twice againhis warder came dumbly serving a meal, otherwise the prisoner might havebeen immeasurably remote from any life and wholly forgotten. There was,besides his visions of Olivia, one other thing to comfort him; it waswhen he heard briefly from some distant part of the castle the ululationof a bagpipe playing an air so jocund that it assured him at all eventsthe Chamberlain was not dead, and was more probably out of danger. Andthen the cold grew intense beyond his bearance, and he reflected uponsome method of escape if it were to secure him no more than exercise forwarmth.
The window was out of the question, for in all probability the watch wasstill on the other side of the fosse--a tombstone for steadfastness andconstancy. Count Victor could not see him now even by standing on hisbox and looking through the aperture, yet he gained something, hegained all, indeed, so pregnant a thing is accident--even the cosycharcoal-fires and the friends about him in the chateau near SaintGermain-en-Laye--by his effort to pierce the dusk and see across theditch.
For as he was standing on the box, widening softly the aperture in thedrifted snow upon the little window-ledge, he became conscious of coldair in a current beating upon the back of his head. The draught, thatshould surely be entering, was blowing out!
At once he thought of a chimney, but there was no fireplace in his cell.Yet the air must be finding entrance elsewhere more freely than from thewindow. Perplexity mastered him for a little, and then he concludedthat the current could come from nowhere else than behind the array ofmarshalled empty bottles.
"_Tonnerre!_" said he to himself, "I have begun my career as winemerchant rather late in life or I had taken more interest in these deadgentlemen. _Avancez, donc, mes princes!_ your ancient spirit once madeplain the vacancies in the heads of his Grace's guests; let us seeif now you do not conceal some holes that were for poor Montaiglon'sprofit."
One by one he pulled them out of their positions until he could intrudea sensitive hand behind the shelves where they had been racked.
There was an airy space.
"_Tres bon! merci, messieurs les cadavres_, perhaps I may forgive youeven yet for being empty."
Hope surged, he wrought eagerly; before long he had cleared away apassage--that ended in a dead wall!
It was perhaps the most poignant moment of his experience. He had, then,been the fool of an illusion! Only a blank wall! His fingers searchedevery inch of it within reach, but came upon nothing but masonry, cold,clammy, substantial.
"A delusion after all!" he said, bitterly disappointed. "A delusion, andnot the first that has been at the bottom of a bottle of wine." Hehad almost resigned himself again to his imprisonment when the puffingcurrent of colder air than that stagnant within the cell struck him forthe second time, more keenly felt than before, because he was warm withhis exertions. This time he felt that it had come from somewhere overthe level of his head. Back he dragged his box and stood upon it behindthe bottle-bin, and felt higher upon the wall than he could do standing,to discover that it stopped short about nine feet from the floor, andwas apparently an incompleted curtain partitioning his cell from somespace farther in.
Not with any vaulting hopes, for an egress from this inner space seemedless unlikely than from the one he occupied, he pulled himself on thetop of the intervening wall and lowered himself over the other side. Atthe full stretch of his arms he failed to touch anything with his feet;an alarming thought came to him; he would have pulled himself back,but the top of the wall was crumbling to his fingers, a mass of rottenmortar threatening each moment to break below his grasp, and he realisedwith a spasm of the diaphragm that now there was no retreat. What--thiswas his thought--what if this was the mouth of a well? Or a mediaevaltrap for fools? He had seen such things in French castles. In the pitchdarkness he could not guess whether he hung above an abyss or had theground within an inch of his straining toes.
To die in a pit!
To die in a pit! good God!--was this the appropriate conclusion to alife with so much of open-air adventure, sunshine, gaiety, and charm init? The sweat streamed upon his face as he strove vainly to hang by oneof his arms and search the cope of the crumbling wall for a surer holdwith the other; he stretched his toes till his muscles cramped, his eyesin the darkness filled with a red cloud, his breath choked him, a visionof his body thrashing through space overcame him, and his slippingfingers would be loose from the mortar in another minute!
To one last struggle for a decent mastery his natural manhood rose, andcleared his brain and made him loose his grip.
He fell less than a yard!
For a moment he stopped to laugh at his foolish terror, and then setbusily to explore this new place in which he found himself. The air wasfresher; the walls on either hand contracted into the space of a lobby;he felt his way along for twenty paces before he could be convincedthat he was in a sort of tunnel. But figure a so-convenient tunnel inconnection with a prison cell! It was too good to be true.
With no great surrender to hope even yet, he boldly plunged into thedarkness, reason assuring him that the _cul-de-sac_ would come sooneror later. But for once reason was wrong; the passage opened ever beforehim, more airy than ever, always dank and odorous, but with never abarrier--a passage the builders of the castle had executed for an ageof sudden sieges and alarms, but now archaic and useless, and finallyforgotten altogether.
He had walked, he knew not how long, when he was brought up by a curioussound--a prolonged, continuous, ho
llow roar as of wind in a wood or asea that rolled on a distant beach. Vainly he sought to identify it, butfinally shook aside his wonder and pushed on again till he came to theapparent end of the passage, where a wooden door barred his progressfarther. He stopped as much in amazement as in dubiety about the door,for the noise that had baffled him farther back in the tunnel was nowclose at hand, and he might have been in a ship's hold and the shipall blown about by tempest, to judge from the inexplicable thunderthat shook the darkness. A score of surmises came quickly, only to bedismissed as quickly as they came; that extraordinary tumult was beyondhis understanding, and so he applied himself to his release. Still hislucky fortune remained with him; the door was merely on a latch. Heplucked it open eagerly, keen to solve the puzzle of the noise, emergingon a night now glittering with stars, and clamant with the roar oftumbling waters.
A simple explanation!--he had come out beside the river. The passagecame to its conclusion under the dumb arch of a bridge whose concavesechoed back in infinite exaggeration every sound of the river as itgulped in rocky pools below.
The landscape round about him in the starshine had a most bewitchinginfluence. Steep banks rose from the riverside and lost themselves ina haze of frost, through which, more eminent, stood the boles and giantmembers of vast gaunt trees, their upper branches fretting the starrysky. No snow was on the spot where he emerged, for the wind, blowinghuge wreaths against the buttresses of the bridge a little higher onthe bank, had left some vacant spaces, but the rest of the world wasblanched well-nigh to the complexion of linen. Where he was to turn tofirst puzzled Count Victor. He was free in a whimsical fashion,indeed, for he was scarcely more than half-clad, and he wore a pair ofdancing-shoes, ludicrously inappropriate for walking in such weatherthrough the country. He was free, but he could not be very far yet fromhis cell; the discovery of his escape might be made known at any moment;and even now while he lingered here he might have followers in thetunnel.
Taking advantage of the uncovered grass he climbed the bank and soughtthe shelter of a thicket where the young trees grew too dense to permitthe snow to enter. From here another hazard of flight was manifest, forhe could see now that the face of the country outside on the level wasspread as with a tablecloth, its white surface undisturbed, ready forthe impress of so light an object as a hopping wren. To make his wayacross it would be to drag his bonds behind him, plainly asking theworld to pull him back. Obviously there must be a more tactical retreat,and without more ado he followed the river's course, keeping ever, as hecould, in the shelter of the younger woods, where the snow did not lieor was gathered by the wind in alleys and walls. Forgotten was the coldin his hurried flight through the trees; but by-and-by it compelledhis attention, and he fell to beating his arms in the shelter of aplantation of yews.
"_Mort de ma vie!_" he thought while in this occupation, "why should Inot have a roquelaire? If his very ungracious Grace refuses to seewhen a man is dying of cold for want of a coat, shall the man not helphimself to a loan? M. le Duc owes Cammercy something for that ride ina glass coach, and for a night of a greatcoat I shall be pleased todischarge the family obligation."
Count Victor there and then came to a bold decision. He would, perhaps,not only borrow a coat and cover his nakedness, but furthermore coverhis flight by the same strategy. The only place in the neighbourhoodwhere he could obscure his footsteps in that white night of stars wasin the castle itself--perhaps in the very fosse whence he had made hisescape. There the traffic of the day was bound to have left a myriadtracks, amongst which the imprint of a red-heeled Rouen shoe would neveradvertise itself. But it was too soon yet to risk so bold a venture, forhis absence might be at this moment the cause of search round all thecastle, and ordinary prudence suggested that he should permit some timeto pass before venturing near the dwelling that now was in his view, itslights blurred by haze, no sign apparent that they missed or searchedfor him.
For an hour or more, therefore, he kept his blood from congelation bywalking back and forward in the thicket into which the softly breathingbut shrewish night wind penetrated less cruelly than elsewhere, andat last judged the interval enough to warrant his advance upon theenterprise.
Behold then Count Victor running hard across the white level waste ofthe park into the very boar's den--a comic spectacle, had there been anyone to see it, in a dancer's shoes and hose, coatless and excited.He looked over the railing of the fosse to find the old silenceundisturbed.
Was his flight discovered yet? If not it was something of a madness,after all, to come back to the jaws of the trap.
"Here's a pretty problem!" he told himself, hesitating upon the brink ofthe ditch into which dipped a massive stair--"Here's a pretty problem!to have the roquelaire or to fly without it and perish of cold, becausethere is one chance in twenty that monsieur the warder opposite mychamber may not be wholly a fool and may have looked into his mousetrap.I do not think he has; at all events here are the alternatives, and thewiser is invariably the more unpleasant. _Allons!_ Victor, _advienne quepourra_, and Heaven help us!"
He ran quickly down the stair into the fosse, crept along in the shelterof the ivy for a little, saw that no one was visible, and darted acrossand up to a postern in the eastern turret. The door creaked noisilyas he entered, and a flight of stairs, dimly lit by candles, presenteditself, up which he ventured with his heart in his mouth. On thefirst landing were two doors, one of them ajar; for a second or twohe hesitated with every nerve in his flesh pulsating and his hearttumultuous in his breast; then hearing nothing, took his courage in hishands and blandly entered, with his feet at a fencer's balance for thesecurity of his retreat if that were necessary. There was a fire glowingin the apartment--a tempting spectacle for the shivering refugee, a dimlight burned within a glass shade upon the mantel, and a table ladenwith drug-vials was drawn up to the side of a heavily-curtained bed.
Count Victor compassed the whole at a glance, and not the least pleasantpart of the spectacle was the sight of a coat--not a greatcoat, butstill a coat--upon the back of a chair that stood between the bed andthe fire.
"With a thousand apologies to his Grace," he whispered to himself, andtiptoed in his soaking shoes across the floor without reflecting for asecond that the bed might have an occupant. He examined the coat; it hada familiar look that might have indicated its owner even if there hadnot been the flageolet lying beside it. Instinctively Count Victorturned about and went up to the bed, where, silently peeping between thecurtains, he saw his enemy of the morning so much in a natural slumberas it seemed that he was heartened exceedingly. Only for a moment helooked; there was the certainty of some one returning soon to the room,and accordingly he rapidly thrust himself into the coat and stepped backupon the stair.
There was but one thing wanting--a sword! Why should he not have his ownback again? As he remembered the interview of the morning, the chamberin which he had left his weapon at the bidding of the Duke was closeat hand, and probably it was still there. Each successive hazardaudaciously faced emboldened him the more; and so he ventured along,searching amid a multitude of doors in dim rushlight till he came uponone that was different from its neighbours only inasmuch as it hada French motto painted across the panels. The motto read "_Revenezbientot_," and smiling at the omen, Count Victor once more took hisvalour in his fingers and turned the handle. "_Revenez bientot_" he waswhispering softly to himself as he noiselessly pushed in the door. Thesentence froze on his lips when he saw the Duchess seated in a chair,and turned half round to look at him.